If you’re using email on your iOS devices it’s likely you’ve encountered the following scenario: You’re going through your inbox, try to delete an email when the following message appears, “Unable to Move Message -> The message could not be moved to the mailbox Trash.”

Moving to your Mac, you discover you can delete the message without a hitch and that the message you delete from your Mac also disappears from your iOS device. But none of your iOS devices will let you delete the file.

When you’re on public (read that untrusted) networks it’s possible for someone on the same network to capture and unwrap your network traffic and essentially ”listen” to your network conversations. This could potentially expose data you’re sending and receiving if your network data isn’t encrypted in some fashion.

Although, we’re focused on incoming connections here, shouldn’t we also be concerned about outgoing connections as well? This seems especially important where there are data caps or outrageously expensive cellular data plans being used.

We need a comprehensive and coordinated gate keeping strategy for all connections.

Frank raises an interesting and important point. While Apple’s Application Level Firewall is great at putting on a good defense, monitoring your outbound traffic can be enlightening and possibly even a little disturbing. It can clue you in to which of your running applications are accessing and sending data to the Internet when you might not be expecting it to and it can help you to see if unexpected applications are sending data out when you don’t want them to.

Hope you can help your readers with something that I haven’t found. I’ve just purchased my first Mac after being on Windows for about 15 years, so I’m looking around for reputable recommendations of free and good anti-virus/firewall programs.

The article Yolanda linked to recommended ClamXav for scanning your Mac for viruses, but Yolanda was correct, there was no mention made of firewall applications.

A little over a year ago I was faced with a spam filtering problem, but it’s not what you might expect.

I had been using the paid Postini service for filtering spam sent through my domain, when Google acquired Postini and, once acquired, killed it off and forced users to transition to their Google Apps platform. I found the Google Apps interface to be clunky and, worse, my users found it difficult to use. In addition, I had no interest in sending all the mail for my private domain through Google’s servers. Suddenly the bang I was getting for my Postini buck had lost its pop, so I went looking for an another solution.

As we talked about in last week’s Working Mac, you may have been led to believe that you don’t have to worry about computer viruses on your Mac. And, to some extent, there’s truth to that. While your Mac can definitely be infected with malware, Apple’s built-in malware detection and file quarantine capabilities are meant to make it less likely that you’ll download and run malicious software.

Apple introduced malware detection to the Mac OS with Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6). This system consists of the quarantine of any app downloaded from the Internet, the use of Code Signing certificates to verify that an app is coming from a legit source, and regular security updates that include databases of known malware targeting the Mac OS.

Small office, large office, home office, school, home user... unless you're in IT it's unlikely you've given much thought to setting up Apple's Server app. In fact, maybe even if you're in IT you haven't given it much thought because, well, why? You're already running Windows servers, right?

With the proliferation of Mac and iOS devices in every corner of your home and office, you may have no idea just how much of your Internet bandwidth is being used to download content from Apple's servers. A caching server can help you make sure all your devices are up to date while leaving your Internet bandwidth almost untouched.

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ServersOS XThe power of Pomodoro (or, how to slice your time to stay on task)Wed, 06 May 2015 03:00:00 -0700Jeffery BattersbyJeffery Battersby

If there is a single conundrum of working with technology it’s how to stay on task with so many little distractions vying for your attention. How to stay focused? Well, it may be as simple as turning off notifications, trimming open apps down to only those required to get your job done, and keeping a timer ticking in the background to help keep you on task.

To be clear, I’m not one of those “Getting-Things-Done-inBox-Zero-Make-A-List-And-Don’t-Let-Go-Until-It’s-Done” kind of folks. But, sometimes I do need a simple tool to help kickstart my focus, particularly at the beginning of a project. For that, I use a timer.

There is a wide variety of Pomodoro timers in the App Store. You should be able to find one to your liking.

Inside your home folder is a Library folder—commonly written in Unix syntax as ~/Library, which means “a folder named Library at the root level of your home folder.” This folder is accessible only to you, and it’s used to store your personal settings, application-support files, and, in some cases, data.

QuickBooks Online Self-Employed is a thinned-down version of QuickBooks Online with a very specific focus: Sole proprietors and small business owners who mix business and personal accounts, who pay quarterly taxes, and who need to do quick triage on business and personal income and expenses. QuickBooks Online Self-Employed performs its magic with the combination of a Web app and an iOS app and makes it easy to quickly separate your business and personal expenses.

QuickBooks Online Self-Employed is small business focused, which is to say that it’s aimed at business owners who are sole proprietors or LLC owners without partners, and who write off business expenses using a Schedule C when filing their personal taxes. The assumption on Intuit’s part is that the people who own these types of businesses often have a commingling of business and personal credit card and bank accounts and that it is often difficult using traditional accounting applications to quickly and easily separate business expenses from personal expenses.

There’s no shortage of choices for cloud storage, but that leads to another problem: how do you decide which services you truly need, and which files to put where? If you’ve signed up for as many cloud providers as you have files, it’s time for an intervention (or at least a moment of clear-headed contemplation).

It’s an old story now, but still worth remembering: When the iPhone debuted way back in 2007, it wasn’t much thought of as a device for business users. It had email, yes, but not many of the security features favored by IT departments—and besides, the BlackBerry dominated the business market anyway.

These days, there’s an iPhone and an iPad in nearly every boardroom. Why? Because the bosses liked them and brought them to work despite the complaints from those IT departments.

But Apple was not blind to the BYOD. Every new update to iOS brings a host of new features designed to mollify the folks down in IT. The release of iOS 8 is no different. It has a host of new features aimed at making iOS devices more secure, more manageable, and more productive.

Perhaps one of the worst threats your Mac faces is the chance of being doused with water or other liquid: In a second, a cup of coffee could leave you about $1500 in the hole for a new Mac (plus $5 for another latte).

Unfortunately, warranties for your Mac (and other electronics) do not cover accidental liquid damage. And if you bring your broken computer to an Apple store for repair, techs may check built-in sensors that will indicate whether or not liquids may have contributed to the problem at hand.

Since we all have had instances of liquids coming dangerously close to our Macs, here are some quick tips for avoiding disaster, and plus a few more that could help fix your Mac should you manage to souse it.

Insert passwords

Tool: Keyboard Maestro Apple has (wisely) made it impossible to auto-expand text in certain secure fields—password fields, for example. That makes it hard to use standard keyboard expansion utilities (including Apple’s own) to fill in password fields. However, Keyboard Maestro is happy to paste templated text into such fields with the press of a keyboard shortcut. So that’s the tool I use when working with convoluted passwords and inflexible fields. I would definitely not implement this on a shared Mac where I wanted to keep my passwords private, however.—Christopher Breen

Lock your Mac when you leave

Tools: AppleScript, Dropbox, Hazel, IFTTT I have a job that’s somewhat security-sensitive, so I make a point to lock my Mac’s screen whenever I step away. As a backup, I have a screensaver set to activate after 10 minutes which requires a password to deactivate. Occasionally I forget to lock my Mac before I leave the office. But using my iPhone in concert with IFTTT, Hazel and Dropbox, I can automatically trigger the screensaver to activate and lock the screen whenever I leave the immediate area, even before that 10 minutes is up.

Auto-hide apps

Tool: DragThing
I work with a lot of apps throughout the day and I keep them open at all times. This could lead to a lot of window clutter if it weren’t for DragThing. Within its General preference you find the Hide Other Applications When Switching option. Now, when I click on an icon in my DragThing app palette, the selected app comes to the fore and all other running apps disappear in the background.—Christopher Breen

Open work apps when connecting to office Wi-Fi

Tool: Keyboard Maestro
Some of my most productive time is in the early morning. I usually arrive at the office before everyone else and get the most done in those early hours, without interruption. Trouble is, I’m also easily distracted. When I sit down at my desk in the morning, it can be too easy and tempting to open Twitter or some other shiny object on my Mac that’ll draw my attention away from the work at hand. I use Keyboard Maestro to get me focused.

Managing files and folders is one of the most obvious—and easiest—chores to automate on your Mac, thanks to specialized tools like Hazel, as well as generalists like AppleScript, Automator, and Keyboard Maestro.

Clear the desktop

Tool: Automator
I’m one of those people who litters his desktop with files throughout the day. I’ve created an Automator workflow that moves these files to a Desktop Moved folder I’ve created within my Documents folder. To create, I opened Automator, and selected Calendar Alarm as the type of document. I then added the following actions, in order: Get Specified Finder Items (adding my Desktop folder to its list); Get Folder Contents; Move Finder Items (specifying my Desktop Moved folder as the target). I set up this alarm to go off every Sunday at 5:00 p.m., so I can start my work week the next morning with a clean desktop.—Christopher Breen

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OS XOS and System EnhancementThe top iOS 8 features for business usersTue, 26 Aug 2014 11:40:00 -0700Ryan FaasRyan Faas

When it shows up in the coming weeks, Apple’s iOS 8 is set to bring several new features, including its HealthKit and HomeKit platforms, to the iPhone and iPad. Many of the advances are consumer-oriented and focused on creating a seamless experience across iOS devices and Macs running the forthcoming OS X Yosemite.

For some users, “organizing files” in the Finder begins and ends with creating folders and moving files into them. But there are a bunch of other things you can do to manage your files in OS X that, whatever your workflow, will make things way easier.

Smart folders

When you perform a standard Finder search by pressing Command-F or using the search bar in any Finder window, you can save this search as a smart folder by clicking the Save button in the top-right of the window. This will save the search as a Smart Folder which, when opened, will only show the files that match your search criteria. (You can also create smart folders by selecting New Smart Folder from the File menu.)

If you’re like most Mac users, you probably don’t give your keyboard much thought: You press a key, it relays that key-press to your system, and that’s all there is to it. But there can, in fact, be much more to it, if you take avantage of OS X’s support for multiple keyboard layouts.

When you initially set up your Mac, the OS X Setup Assistant gives you the option of choosing a default keyboard layout. Many users never deviate from that initial choice. You can, however, choose a different keyboard layout any time you want. For instance, if you’re composing in French, you might be better off using AZERTY instead of the standard QWERTY. Same goes for composing in non-Roman alphabets, such as Chinese or Russian: You can switch your keyboard layout to any number of those. And many users prefer to use the Dvorak (or other alternative) layout for more efficient typing.

As I’ve traveled around the world giving presentations, I’ve seen Murphy’s Law in action, up close, many times. Much as I might prepare ahead of time, things still go wrong all the time. And every time something does go wrong, I add another item or two to my emergency toolkit, the better to be prepared for next time.

Here are some of the things that have ended up in that toolkit. If you have a big presentation—especially if it’s out of town, where you won’t have access to your usual resources—consider putting together a similar toolkit of your own.

Modern presentation apps like Keynote and PowerPoint still encourage you to think in terms of “slides”: discrete, isolated objects to be presented one after the other, as though we were still using those old slide projectors to show film-in-square-frames slides. Our audiences may even expect to receive printed or PDF copies of our slides, one tidy image per page.

But that metaphor is a relic of an earlier time. Technology has moved on, and you can create far more interesting and appealing presentations if you move beyond the idea of “slides” and adopt a more fluid, seamless approach.

The best-known tool for presentations-that-are-not-slides is Prezi (4.0 mice), which gives you a huge canvas on which you place individual elements; you then pan, zoom, and rotate the view to highlight specific items. It’s a neat effect, but I prefer to downplay animations and transitions, not to call extra attention to them.